[Rhodes22-list] Political: Voter Suppression

[Brad Haslett]

Ben,

One can only hope that "free 'gubment' cheese" suppression is taking
place as well. It is unfortunate that a first world country has a
third world election process.  Both parties are to blame for this.  In
the case of Ohio, the Secretary of State is acting "crooked as hell"
and should be sued.  Frankly, I don't thing it is too much to ask of
citizens to make sure their homework is done in advance of an
election.  Just because you can "fog a mirror" shouldn't be an
automatic qualification to vote.  I'm in favor of mandating that you
have to be able to score three digits on an IQ test, but yes, that may
be a bit demanding and unfair.

Brad

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Ben Cittadino <bcittadino at dcs-law.com> wrote:
>
> This is a disturbing report. For all the "voter fraud" charges on the one
> hand, there seem to be "voter suppression" charges on the other.
>
> ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to
> voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter
> registration card in her wallet.
>
>
> "Vote suppression is real. It does sometimes happen," said Daniel P. Tokaji,
> a law professor at Ohio State University.
>
>  But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election
> officials.
>
> "This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating
> that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible
> to vote," a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and
> Elections said.
>
> But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a
> passport and a birth certificate to prove it.
>
> The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was
> dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter
> was postmarked October 9.
>
> "It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her
> to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late,
> apparently,' " Berry said.
>
> Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been
> "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification
> information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship
> questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.
>
> Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or
> "purged," from voter rolls.
>
> It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases
> like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing
> states.
>
> "What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike
> millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret,
> prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an
> elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justi
>
> "That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the
> voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity
> to correct it before Election Day."
>
> Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability"
> is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state.
>
> "But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up
> thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it
> before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she
> said.
>
> Such allegations have flared up across the United States during this
> election cycle, most notably in Ohio, where a recent lawsuit has already
> gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.
>
> There, the state Republican Party sued Ohio's Democratic secretary of state
> in an effort to make her generate a list of people who had mismatched
> information. But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said generating such a
> list would create numerous problems too close to the election and possibly
> disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
>
> The Supreme Court last week ruled against the GOP on appeal of a lower court
> order directing Brunner to prepare the list.
>
> In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter
> registration applications from a three-week period in September were
> mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors. Florida's
> Republican secretary of state ordered the computer match system implemented
> in early September.
>
> In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's
> election board after it voted against a proposal to implement a "no-match"
> policy. The board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22
> percent match failure rate -- including for four of the six members of the
> board.
>
> The Brennan Center has also documented cases across the country of possible
> illegal purging, impediments to college student voting and difficulties
> accessing voter registration.
>
> A lawsuit has been filed over Georgia's mismatch system, and the state is
> also under fire for requesting Social Security records for verification
> checks on about 2 million voters -- more requests than any other state.
>
> One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit says Georgia is violating a
> federal law that prohibits widespread voter purges within 90 days of the
> election, arguing that the letters were sent out too close to the election
> date.
>
> "They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those
> matches to send these letters out to voters," said McDonald, director of the
> ACLU Voting Rights Project in Georgia.
>
> "It's not, you know, an individualized notion of people maybe not being
> citizens or not being residents. They're using a systematic purging
> procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws."
>
> Asked if he believed that eligible voters were purged in Georgia, McDonald
> said, "If people who are properly eligible, are getting improperly
> challenged and purged, the answer would be 'Yes,' " he said.
>
> Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and
> Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate
> two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election.
>
> "People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens,
> including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore,
> another plaintiff in the Georgia lawsuit. "They're being told they're not
> eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been
> checked and approved by the Department of Justice, and that we know has
> flaws in it."
>
> Georgia's Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican who began working on
> purging voter rolls since she was elected in 2006, said that won't happen.
> If there are errors, she said, there is still plenty of time to resolve the
> problems.
>
> Handel says she is not worried the verification process will prevent
> eligible voters from casting a ballot.
>
> "In this state and all states, there's a process to ensure that a voter who
> comes in -- even if there's a question about their status -- that they will
> vote either provisional or challenge ballot, which is a paper ballot," she
> said.
>
> "So then the voter has ample opportunity to clarify any issues or address
> them," Handel added. "And I think that's a really important process."
>
> Handel denied the efforts to verify the vote are suppression.
>
> "This is about ensuring the integrity of our elections," she said. "It is
> imperative to have checks and balances on the front end, during the
> processes and on the back end. That's what the verification process is
> about."
>
> So someone like Kyla Berry will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot when
> she votes, but it's up to county election officials whether those ballots
> would actually count.
>
>
> Berry says she will try to vote, but she's not confident it will count.
>
> "I know this happens, but I cannot believe it's happening to me," she said.
> "If I weren't allowed to vote, I would just feel like that would be ... like
> the worst thing ever -- a travesty."
>
> Ben C.
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Political%3A-Voter-Suppression-tp20188986p20188986.html
> Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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